Use quest turn-ins to decrease the over supply of items
I think we have an over supply of items, which causes really nice items to be very cheap. The supply of items needs to be reduced in order for the prices to match the actual value of an item.
For example, suppose I get a "Dreamer's Set Lightning Staff" in AO2. Which has nice stats, and should be a nice reward. Then I go to the cs in Balefort, and see that It is currently selling for around 1500 gold. It is rare to get a nice pink, and very disappointing to find that it's almost worthless.
Reducing the drop rate is not a very good solution, because it is much too disappointing to get one pink per 100 hours of play time.
One solution to reducing the supply would be to include giving items to npc's during quests. For example, a blacksmith npc may buy pink and purple items for gold. And, once in a while the blacksmith may say, "Thank's for the business... Oh i found this recipe that might interest you." And there could be a 10% chance to get a nice recipe. This would cause the low priced items in cs to be purchased for questing. At some price point, it is no longer profitable to buy an item for the quest. This would create a ballace such that there would never be really cheap nice items, because they would be used for questing.
Another way to to it would be to give two identical items to a smith npc, and have him do some crafting to give the same item back, but with one more point of AC. In this way, 2 of an item gets +1 ac. 4 gets +2 ac, .... etc. For example, if you had 16 "Battleborn Shield of Destiny", then repeatedly doing the combine quest would create a shield with 4 more AC giving it 32 instead of 28. The hate shield is 37 AC, so you would need 1024 BBSoD to create the shield with the same AC. Currently, BBSoD costs about 1000 gold each, so for 16K gold, I can add 4 ac.
